Lesson 3: How to Use Google URL Builder to Create UTM Codes

Video transcript

We're almost ready to syndicate our content, but before we do, I have to
teach you how to use the Google URL Builder. The Google URL Builder is
basically a free tool that Google offers that allows you to take the URL's
of your different blog posts, put them in this tool, and append them with
different queries so that you can tell where your traffic is coming from.
I'll explain that in a second.

The first thing you do is go to Google. Then, type in "URL builder" right
into Google. The first thing that pops up is this "URL Builder Analytics
Help." Click on that. Now we are at the Google URL Builder, and this is the
tool. What we're going to do is create a URL for each individual place that
we're going to share the content.

The first one we'll do, we'll just put in the link to our content here,
wherever that is. In this case, it's SmartMarketer.com. Let's say that we
were driving people to the home page of my website. Of course, we're going
to be driving people to our different blog posts, but we're going to use
this right now as an example.

You'd put in your campaign source. Let's imagine we're posting to Facebook,
so this is for Facebook. Facebook would be the campaign source. The medium
would be fanpage. The source is basically where it is. The medium is what
you are using. For Twitter the campaign source would be Twitter and the
medium would be Twitter. The only reason this is Facebook and fanpage is on
Facebook we have a fanpage. We're going to have different fanpages. For
Google+ the campaign source would be Google+ and the medium would be
Google+.

Then, for the term we put in whatever that specific post is. It might be
tactics. That was one of my posts. This is for the tactics post. We put in
our source, our medium, and then for term, content name, we put the same
thing. Click submit.

It's going to give us this big long URL, but look at what this URL is. It's
just the URL you gave them, and they've appended these little UTM codes.
So, it says UTM source=facebook, UTM medium=fanpage. What that does is when
someone follows this link to go to your post, instead of just going to your
post by going directly... if you were just to put a link directly to your
post, this will tell you where they came from.

You're going to create a URL like this for Facebook, for Pinterest, for
Google+, and for Twitter. We're also going to create it for our Facebook
ad, and it'll show up in our Google Analytics which I'll show you in just a
second.

Once we get this big long URL we're going to copy it. We're going to go to
tinyurl.com. Click on tinyurl.com. We're going to paste that big long URL
into the little box here on TinyURL and we're going to say "Make Tiny."
What that's going to do is make it very small. It's going to take that big
URL that we just created and it's going to condense it down.

Then, I'm going to grab this little thing. I would put this into my text
document and I would say tiny URL for Facebook. I'm not going to actually
do it, but I'll just paste this tiny URL in and you'll see. It'll take us
right to the home page of my website, but it has these codes right here
linked into it.

So, in our analytics account, we will be able to see how many people came
to this specific post from our post on Facebook, how many people came to
this specific post from our post out to our Twitter profile, and how many
people came to this specific piece of content on our blog from the email
that we sent. We can see these different channels that we're leveraging,
these different social channels, how many people are actually going from
those social channels back to our piece of content. It's very, very
effective.

I'm going to show you a screenshot of it right now. You can see here that
we use Campaigner as our email service for one of our businesses, and we
use email as the medium. So, the source we use in our Google URL Builder
for the different emails that we send out, each one of these is a different
link. This was a link to our Thanksgiving promotion. This was a link to a
different sale we had. This was a link to one of our videos. You can see
SWC32. This was a link to a video we shared about a guy called Arthur.

So, the source is campaign, the medium is email, and then it's got our
query. In Google Analytics we can see, from each different email, we sent
because we used the Google URL Builder for each one of those emails. So,
instead of just linking to our piece of content in the email we linked to
our piece of content through a Google URL Builder URL, and it allows us to
see, in our analytics, how many people came from each place.

If you see here we can see how many people came from Facebook, how many
people came from YouTube, how many people came from AOL. I'm going to show
you right now, break it down a little deeper, by actually going live into
my analytics account. Let's check that out.

Here we are in my Google Analytics account for SmartMarketer.com. I've gone
to all traffic over here on the left. I've broken it down by source,
medium, and keyword. You can see OfficeAutoPilot is the email service that
I use. The medium is email. So, for example, when I set my link, when I
built the Google URL Builder link for the tactics and strategy email, I put
tactics as the keyword. You can see how many people came from that.

We scroll down a little bit and we can see Facebook ads is a link that I
sent, so when I'm doing my Facebook ads, I create a Google URL Builder URL
that I link from my Facebook ads back to my website so I can see in
analytics how many people came from this specific Facebook ad. It's just a
really great way to track what's going on.

Instead of just linking from your social profiles when we syndicate back to
your website, we want to create an actual Google URL Builder URL for each
one of our social syndication services. That's Google+ we're going to
create one for. We're going to create one for Twitter, for Facebook and for
our email as well. That's four different URL Builder URL's that we're
creating.

I'm back here at the Google URL Builder, and I just want to drill this in
so you know how to use this. The URL is going to stay the same, because
you're sending people to the same post. The post of the URL doesn't change.
The only thing that's different, what changes, is maybe it's coming from
Pinterest. Sorry, not Pinterest, Pinterest doesn't allow you to put these
in there. Maybe it's coming from Facebook, and it's for your tactics. This
stays the same, too. The term, the content, and the name all stay the same.

The only thing that changes is the source and the medium. So, maybe it's
Facebook, or maybe it's Google+, would be here. Then you'd click submit and
generate the URL like that. Or, maybe it's Twitter. So, the only thing that
changes is the campaign source and medium. The term, the content, the name,
and the URL stay the same.

I just wanted to show you how to use the Google URL Builder, because you're
going to need those URL's. You're going to need to create them and make
them tiny through TinyURL.com and paste them in a text document. Because
we're going to use them in the syndication process which we're about to do
right now in the next video.